The GPRS or universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is an evolution of the global system for mobile communications (GSM) standard to provide packet switched data services to GSM mobile stations. Packet-switched data services are used for transmitting chunks of data or for data transfers of an intermittent or bursty nature. Typical applications for 3GPP packet service include Internet browsing, wireless e-mail, and credit card processing, etc.
As the adoption of mobile broadband increases, the need for a higher capacity backhaul goes up. Evolved high speed packet access (HSPA+) already provides a bandwidth in tens of Mbps per user and adding femto services to the third-generation (3G) offerings will provide users access to more and more broadband data services, which in turn may choke the core network nodes which were not designed for the onslaught of the mobile broadband, since each user can get up to 2 Mbps creating around tenfold increase in traffic.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a typical GPRS network architecture. Referring to FIG. 1, user equipments (UEs) 101-103 are communicatively coupled to a GPRS core network 110 via a respective access network or cell. For example, UE 101 is coupled to the core network 110 via an IP-BTS access network 104 (e.g., node B or NB) and radio network controller (RNC) 111. UE 102 is coupled to the core network 110 via a corresponding femto cell 105 (e.g., home node B or HNB). UE 103 is coupled to the core network 110 via a corresponding long term evolution (LTE) access network (e.g., evolved UMTS terrestrial RAN (E-UTRAN) node B or eNB). In order to access other networks such as Internet 120 and/or operator services node 109, UEs 101-103 have to go through core network 110. Typically, core network 110 includes a serving GPRS support node (SGSN) or serving gateway (SGW) 107 and a gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) or packet data network (PDN) GW 108. These SGSN/SGW and GGSN/PDN GW relay communications between a user terminal (e.g., source mobile station) and a destination.
Note that typically, there may be multiple SGSNs/SGWs associated with a GGSN/PDN GW, multiple access networks associated with a SGSN/SGW, and multiple UEs associated with an access network in a hierarchical structure (not shown). Thus, when traffic from the UEs increases, the traffic imposed on higher level nodes (e.g., SGSN/SGW and/or GGSN/PDN GW) in the hierarchical structure will be exponentially increased.
Based on an analysis of mobile broadband data traffic patterns, a majority of traffic from UEs is Internet bound traffic, which does not benefit from session anchoring in a traditional mobile packet core. Making the Internet bound traffic traverse the core network 110 uses core network 110 resources and will add unnecessary delays to the Internet traffic. With the increase in mobile broadband traffic, the built-in hierarchy in the existing architecture results in more investment in the core network 110, and the transmission network from an access network to a core network without exploiting the nomadic and Internet nature of traffic.
There are many methods and systems to address the issue of offloading the load from operator networks as broadband services are getting more and more popular. However, most of these ideas only address part of the network or subset of available technologies. For example, femto cell architecture helps offloading the backhaul between a radio access network (RAN) and a core network (CN), but it may end up adding more loads on to CN. The IP-BTS technology also offloads the backhaul but security issue over open IP arises (while CN is not offloaded either).